April 6th, 2011

After two years of R&D, I decided it’s now time to take La Distribution to the next level. I have thought about many options, and concluded the best way to achieve our mission was to create a strong company that would fully back La Distribution.

The core product commercialized by The Company will be AppSlots, a state of the art web application platform. AppSlots will offer a strong alternative to traditional web hosting providers, by focusing on web applications and only web applications, while bringing the best of the SAAS model.

The secondary mission of The Company will be to expand La Distribution application catalog. We will look for great applications where they are and do everything we can to make them available to our users. This means for example supporting new technology stacks when needed, or dealing with commercial providers as appropriate. We’ll also support the indie developer scene, and do our best to help amateurs and hobbyists code fun or useful applications integrated with La Distribution.

To achieve these goals, The Company will of course commit to further developments of La Distribution open source technologies. Outside contributions will be more than ever welcomed, and it will always be a pleasure for us to see more people and partners involved in La Distribution.

In the coming weeks, we’ll discuss with investors and strategic partners to setup a seed investment round. We’re not looking for billions, just enough money to build a solid corporate structure, hire key people and consolidate our investments in strategic areas.

March 31st, 2011

In our previous blog post, we explained why La Distribution was a perfect platform to code simple web applications. Now, we’ll explain you how to start coding and distributing your first application with the Limonade framework.

Given that you are a seasoned web developer, it should not be difficult. And if you’re not, hey, are you sure you want to do this? :)

March 29th, 2011

At first, La Distribution main goal was to help users install and use existing web applications (like WordPress, DokuWiki, etc). To achieve that, we created a proper infrastructure featuring: 1-click install, single sign on, an unified UI, etc. This effort was very pragmatic: we observed what needed real world applications to work with La Distribution, then we implemented only what was necessary. To date, it works pretty well.

Very early, it has been evident that this pretty nice infrastructure was in fact an opportunity to create very simple applications targeting La Distribution. By running within La Distribution, these applications would be able to focus on their core job, instead of boring things like user management, user registration, user authentication, installation, updates, extensions/themes management. Isn’t this actually a developer dream?

It sounds like a framework, but it’s not a framework, developers can use the framework they want. It’s an environment.

As a proof of concept, because we wanted some applications to inject content into the news feed, and also because it’s the “Hello World” of its generation, we decided to create a simple Twitter client.

First, we asked Twitter Inc if it was a good idea to build yet another Twitter client. Their answer was no ;) But anyway, we created it!

Its name his Le Tweeting, it’s open source, it’s definitely perfectible, and developers are encouraged to fork it on Github .

This application, a few upcoming others and a selection of community-made web applications will now be made available from this new repository (add the URL in your La Distribution repositories).

http://ladistribution.net/repositories/edge/apps

We are pretty proud to have created a platform where you can code a web app and make it available to everyone in minutes.

Now, your turn!

Which application would like to be created for La Distribution? Which one would you like to build?

Think about it, and later this week, I will share with you a tutorial explaining how to code and distribute a simple web application from zero.

July 1st, 2010

For those who don’t know it, Status.net is the leading open source Twitter alternative. It allows users to install their own microblogging service for their company, their community, or simply for a personal use.

What are this magical plugins?

June 24th, 2010

If you don’t know Firefox Sync, it’s a Firefox extension that allow you to save and synchronize all your Firefox related data (bookmarks, passwords, history). It’s an essential extension for people who use Firefox on different computers.

We’re now proposing in La Distribution the server part, where the Firefox extension actually store the data.